Melton Mowbray Building Society Conveyancing Panel Information

Unlike the CML the Building Society Mortgage Instructions deal with this. Section A.12 states ‘In order to act on our behalf your firm or company must be a member of our conveyancing panel provided we are a society that operates one – see specific requirements for details of our arrangements. The Special Requirements state:

You must also comply with the terms and conditions of your Melton Mowbray Building Society solicitor panel appointment.

No such training is arranged by the BSA however they do host numerous general legal related conferences which are attended by firms on the Melton Mowbray Building Society conveyancing panel. We do intend to run specific lender focused seminars in the coming months including a webinar on Melton Mowbray Building Society’s obligations . Practitioners on the Melton Mowbray Building Society conveyancing panel are welcome . Information about the webinar will be made available as part of the LENDERmonitor Alerts .

The Law Society of Scotland has advised that solicitors should check their lender panel status prior to accepting client instructions to act. The advice is lender-agnostic as it does not relate specifically to solicitors on the Melton Mowbray Building Society conveyancing panel. The recommendation arises from the practice of a number of mortgage lenders who remove solicitors from their panels without prior notice as part of their panel management system, which can lead to some solicitors discovering this only once instructed. This is sensible advice as a client finding out midway through a transaction that their lawyer is not on the approved lender panel is very frustrating and can lead to complaints. Many online consumer forums contain posts where someone is complaining about finding that their lawyer is not on a lender conveyancing panel. Such forums include mumsnet.com

The feeling from lenders generally (we can not speak for Melton Mowbray Building Society specifically), is that for too long solicitors have concentrated on their duty of care to their purchasing client, and have paid scant attention to the duty they owe to the lender, whom they conveniently forget is also their client.

Looking from the lenders’ perspective, it has to be said that there are pressures to encourage smaller panels. The Financial Services Authority regards the open panel system as a major contributor to mortgage fraud and negligence cases, and has been leaning on lenders to move to proactive panel management, which is more expensive the larger the panel. Hence it is becoming more common for lenders to charge fees, and/or require extensive form-filling, from would-be panel members

Melton Mowbray Building Society and other BSA lenders are in varying stages of reviewing their approach to vetting firms on their conveyancing panels, to ensure their ongoing exposure to unsuitable firms is reduced.

There are many reports available but examples include:

• Average time frame to register charges at the Land Registry
• Average time frame to send deeds to the lender (calculated from completion date or title registration)
• Number of conveyancing cases by lender
• The percentage of the firm’s business which is conveyancing (purchase and remortgage)
• Average mortgage advance
• Buy to Let transactions
• Disclosure to Lender analysis indicating frequency and nature of disclosures - to include benchmarking analysis against aggregate data
• Evidence of undertaking logs
• Current and historic missed priority dates
• Analysis as to the nature of clients (e.g. new client )

There are various requirements you need to follow if you wish to comply with your lender client’s instructions as set out in the BSA Mortgage Instructions. (a) You must take reasonable steps to verify that there are no discrepancies between the description of the property as compared to an out of date postal address or DX details.

With banks and conveyancing firms working so closely with one another it is surprising that there has not been much call for the introduction of a bit of transparency regarding not just the figures for the Melton Mowbray Building Society conveyancing panel but for all mortgage panel listings

BSA lenders do not come within the top 20 lenders in terms of frequency of questions. The most popular lender panels in terms of questions are as follows:

• Santander Conveyancing Panel
• National Westminster Bank Conveyancing Panel
• Royal Bank of Scotland Conveyancing Panel
• HSBC Conveyancing Panel
• Lloyds Conveyancing Panel